In 1996, Salim Hamdan, a 26-year-old Yemeni with a thick mustache and kinky black hair, was working part time as a taxi driver, dividing his modest income between the mattress he rented in a crowded boardinghouse in the dirty, bustling city of Sana and his daily supply of khat leaves, the stimulant that most Yemeni men chew by the fistful. Then one day the low-hanging horizon of his life lifted: he was recruited for jihad. He joined about 35 other Muslims, mostly Yemenis, who were preparing to leave for Tajikistan to fight alongside that country's small Islamic insurgency against its Russian-backed government.

One of the group's leaders was a self-assured young man named Nasser al-Bahri. Hamdan, an orphaned only child from a rural tribal village in southern Yemen, was naturally drawn to strong personalities. Although two years his junior, al-Bahri, who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, was far more worldly and sophisticated than Hamdan and was without question the most educated person he had ever met. Al-Bahri had studied business in college, but he was also deeply steeped in the Koran, having become a devout Muslim as a teenager in rebellion against his bourgeois upbringing. He spoke comfortably and forcefully about the plight of Muslims all over the world, and he had traveled extensively, to places as far as Bosnia and Somalia, to defend his oppressed Islamic brethren.

Hamdan, who had the rough equivalent of a fourth-grade education, wasn't especially religious and had no grand plans for his life other than the hope that he might someday be married, but he nevertheless embraced the idea of becoming a holy warrior. It didn't hurt that the trip was to be paid for - al-Bahri told him that the group had raised money from a handful of Saudi-based Muslim charities - and that Hamdan would also receive a salary.

The jihadis convened in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and started working their way north toward Tajikistan, first by jeep and th...